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The great trunks of the trees were often scored by tigers' claws, this animal indulging in the cat-like propensity of rising and stretching itself against such objects. Two species of Dillenia were common in the forest, with long grass, Symplocos, Emblica, and Cassia Fistula, now covered with long pods. Several parasitical air-plants grew on the dry trees, as Oberonia, Vanda, and Aerides.
Some of the orchids appear to be spread by birds amongst the trees; but the different species of Vanda are increasing so fast, that there seems no doubt that this tribe of air-plants grows freely from seed in a wild state, though we generally fail to rear them in England. Dr.
It was now only a question of sturdy fighting and squirming one's way through the meshes of a gigantic basketwork of every variety of fantastic branch and stem and stout strangling thorn-set vine, made the denser with snaky roots not merely twisting about one's feet, but dropping from the boughs in nooses and festoons for one's neck; air-plants too, like birds' nests, further choking up the meshes, and hanging moss, like rotting carpets, adding still more to the murk and curious squalor of a foul fertility where beauty, like humanity, found it impossible to breathe.
The gigantic palms and foliage trees, all tufted with air-plants or strangled with climbers, were literally buried in flowers of every hue, and the crown of the forest rolled under us like a sea of blossoms. Every moment one enchanting prospect after another opened to our wondering eyes.
Every silk-cotton tree is covered with what Jamaicans term "wild pines," air-plants, orchids, and other epiphytes, and every silk-cotton was to him a potential Golconda, so whenever we came across one he wanted the buggy stopped, and up the tree he went like a lamp lighter.
The ultimate branchlets are very slender and pendulous; my Lepcha boys used to make elegant chaplets of them, binding the withes with scarlet worsted. The trunk is quite erect, smooth, cylindrical, and pine-like; it harbours no moss, but air-plants, Orchids, and ferns, nestle on the limbs, and pendulous lichens, like our beard-moss, wave from the branches. In the evening I ascended to Doobdi.
The one slope, cold and damp, was densely forested with trees, loaded with air-plants and orchids. The other slope, warmer and drier, was far less heavily grown, and in large part, with pines. Among the plants noticed by the roadside was a species of pinguicula which was very common on damp clay-cuttings.
That strange world hath a structure and a furniture all its own; its chalcedonic rocks are painted with rare creatures floating in their liquid-seeming hardness; forms of other spheres lie buried in its lias cliffs; seeds of unknown plants, relics of unlimnèd reptiles, fragments of an old creation, the ruins of a fanciful cosmogony, lie hid until the day of their requiral beneath its fertile soil: and then its lawless botany; flowers of glorious hue hung upon the trees of its forests; luscious fruits flung liberally among the mosses of its banks; air-plants sailing in its atmosphere; unanchored water-lilies dancing in its bright cascades; and this, too, a world, an inner secret world, peopled with unthought images, specimens of a peculiar creation; outlandish forms are started from its thickets, the dragon and the cherub are numbered with its winged inhabitants, and herds of uncouth shape pasture on its meadows.
That strange world hath a structure and a furniture all its own; its chalcedonic rocks are painted with rare creatures floating in their liquid-seeming hardness; forms of other spheres lie buried in its lias cliffs; seeds of unknown plants, relics of unlimnèd reptiles, fragments of an old creation, the ruins of a fanciful cosmogony, lie hid until the day of their requiral beneath its fertile soil: and then its lawless botany; flowers of glorious hue hung upon the trees of its forests; luscious fruits flung liberally among the mosses of its banks; air-plants sailing in its atmosphere; unanchored water-lilies dancing in its bright cascades; and this, too, a world, an inner secret world, peopled with unthought images, specimens of a peculiar creation; outlandish forms are started from its thickets, the dragon and the cherub are numbered with its winged inhabitants, and herds of uncouth shape pasture on its meadows.
Yet it was on this very slope, so frequently cold and wet, that the oaks, covered with air-plants and blooming orchids, were at their finest. Ferns in astonishing variety, from the most delicate, through giant herbaceous forms, to magnificent tree-ferns; lycopods of several species, and selaginellas, in tufts, covered the slopes; and great banks of begonias, in fine bloom, showed themselves.
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